Animal Stories and Endings

I recently read "H is for Hawk."

While it was a good book, she said something that made me think. She loved animal books as a kid, but the animals always seemed to die. I started thinking of the older animal books I'd read (or at least the less new ones). And she's right. The main animal generally seems to die. 

(Spoilers for several books/films)

In Watership Down, Hazel has lived a long and full life, so it's not so bad when he joins the Black Rabbit. 

But most of the deaths are pretty gruesome.

Sometimes it's to deliberately highlight how humans treat animals. Like in Black Beauty, which was written to draw attention to the cruel treatment of horses. It's not the main horse that dies in this instance, but one of his friends.

Most of the time, the author seems like they're killing off animals just to teach kids a lesson about life. 

I haven't read The Yearling yet, but I saw the movie. That at least said that wild animals don't make good pets. Which is true, except for a rare person who knows exactly what they're doing. In this book, as in life, humans interfere with wild animals and the animal usually ends up paying the ultimate price (animals that are too friendly with humans generally end up dying for various reasons - for example, at the zoo there was a young squirrel who was apparently very friendly and was climbing on people and letting them pet him. Then he bit a girl, who had probably scared him. Staff had to catch the squirrel and send it in for rabies testing. You can't do a rabies test on a live animal. That squirrel had probably been hand-raised illegally, and released as a tame animal. Only to die shortly after. And the girl who was bitten was told to go straight to the doctor). 

For Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows, the dogs die fighting a dangerous enemy. Yeller saves several people from a rabid wolf. And while he doesn't die in the fight, he's bitten by a rabid animal. Which is a death sentence. The dogs are heroes in these cases. 

Sometimes it's hard to tell why the animal suffers such an awful fate. In The Red Pony, the young horse caught a chill which lead to a long and painful decline. When we first see the dead horse, a vulture has just torn out his eye. The boy smashes the bird to death. Then he gets a new foal. Well, actually he gets a mare that's about to foal. But there are complications. A horseman bashes in the mare's head and cuts the foal out of her stomach.  From that point on, we never really see the foal again. Considering how important the red pony was to the boy, it's baffling that the second foal would completely disappear once he's born.